Multiple Autisms
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Multiple Autisms
Author: Jennifer S. Singh
language: en
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Release Date: 2015-12-01
Is there a gene for autism? Despite a billion-dollar, twenty-year effort to find out—and the more elusive the answer, the greater the search seems to become—no single autism gene has been identified. In Multiple Autisms, Jennifer S. Singh sets out to discover how autism emerged as a genetic disorder and how this affects those who study autism and those who live with it. This is the first sustained analysis of the practices, politics, and meaning of autism genetics from a scientific, cultural, and social perspective. In 2004, when Singh began her research, the prevalence of autism was reported as 1 in 150 children. Ten years later, the number had jumped to 1 in 100, with the disorder five times more common in boys than in girls. Meanwhile the diagnosis changed to “autistic spectrum disorders,” and investigations began to focus more on genomics than genetics, less on single genes than on hundreds of interacting genes. Multiple Autisms charts this shift and its consequences through nine years of ethnographic observations, analysis of scientific and related literatures, and morethan seventy interviews with autism scientists, parents of children with autism, and people on the autism spectrum. The book maps out the social history of parental activism in autism genetics, the scientific optimism about finding a gene for autism and the subsequent failure, and the cost in personal and social terms of viewing and translating autism through a genomic lens. How is genetic information useful to people living with autism? By considering this question alongside the scientific and social issues that autism research raises, Singh’s work shows us the true reach and implications of a genomic gaze.
Narrating the Many Autisms
Autism is a profoundly contested idea. The focus of this book is not what autism is or what autistic people are, but rather, it grapples with the central question: what does it take for autistic people to participate in a shared world as equals with other people? Drawing from her close reading of a range of texts and narratives, by autistic authors, filmmakers, bloggers, and academics, Anna Stenning highlights the creativity and imagination in these accounts and also considers the possibilities that emerge when the unexpected and novel aspects of experience are attended to and afforded their due space. Approaching these narrative accounts in the context of both the Anthropocene and neoliberalism, Stenning unpacks and reframes understandings about autism and identity, agency and mattering, across sections exploring autistic intelligibility, autistic sensibility, and community-oriented collaboration and care. By moving away from the non-autistic stories about autism that have, over time, dominated public conception of the autistic experience and relationships, as well as the cognitive and psychoanalytic paradigms that have reduced autism and autistic people to a homogeneous group, the book instead reveals the multiplicity of autistic subjectivities and their subsequent understandings of well-being and vulnerability. It calls on readers to listen to what autistic people have to say about the possibilities of resistance and solidarity against intersecting currents and eddies of power, which endanger all who challenge the neoliberal conception of Life. A stirring and meaningful departure from atomized accounts of neurological difference, Narrating the Many Autisms ponders big questions about its topic and finds clarity and meaning in the sense-making practices of autistic individuals and groups. It will appeal to scholarly readers across the fields of disability studies, the medical humanities, cultural studies, critical psychology, sociology, anthropology, and literature.
The Autisms
Author: Craig M. Powell
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Release Date: 2013
The science of autism has seen tremendous breakthroughs in the past few decades. A multitude of relatively rare mutations have been identified to explain around 15 % of autism cases with many of these genetic causes systematically examined in animal models. This marriage of human genetics and basic neurobiology has led to major advances in our understanding of how these genetic mutations alter brain function and help to better understand the human disease. These scientific approaches are leading to the identification of potential therapeutic targets for autism that can be tested in the very same genetic models and hopefully translated into novel, rational therapies. The Autisms: Molecules to Model Systems provides a roadmap to many of these genetic causes of autism and clarifies what is known at the molecular, cellular, and circuit levels. Focusing on tractable genetic findings in human autism and painstakingly dissecting the underlying neurobiology, the book explains, is the key to understanding the pathophysiology of autism and ultimately to identifying novel treatments.